Current plastic packaging waste management practices in Europe, but also in other countries require improvement due to legal and societal requirements. To meet high recycling rates, significant changes among others in post-consumer packaging waste sorting become necessary. This waste stream is dominated by plastic packaging. Inorganic fluorescent tracer materials (oxide crystals doped with ytterbium Yb³⁺ sensitizer ions and either erbium (Er³⁺), holmium (Ho³⁺) or thulium (Tm³⁺) activator ions) enable a sorting criterion which is independent of the properties of the packaging materials. The authors propose to use up-conversion fluorescence as a unique mean for polymer marking and product identification. To this end, PE-HD film samples, with 10, 100 and 1000 ppm of marker concentration in different polymer matrix colours (semi-transparent, yellow, green, and black) were irradiated with 980 nm diode laser radiation, with an excitation intensity up to 10 W/cm². The performance of three different marker types with their maximum emission in green, red, and NIR was measured and assessed both with and without polymer matrix. Moreover, PE-HD sample bottles with tracers were tested, and a tracer regime for specific code generation for improved polymer identification is proposed.

由于法律和社会要求，欧洲以及其他国家/地区目前的塑料包装废物管理做法都需要改进。为了达到较高的回收率，有必要对消费后包装废物分类进行重大改变。这种废物流以塑料包装为主。无机荧光示踪剂材料（掺有Y Yb ³⁺敏化剂离子和（Er ³⁺），（Ho ³⁺）或th（Tm ³⁺）活化剂离子）可以实现独立于包装材料特性的分类标准。作者建议使用上转换荧光作为聚合物标记和产物鉴定的独特方法。为此，用激发强度为980 nm的二极管激光辐射照射具有10、100和1000 ppm标记物浓度的不同聚合物基质颜色（半透明，黄色，绿色和黑色）的PE-HD薄膜样品。高达10 W / cm ²。在有和没有聚合物基质的情况下，都测量并评估了三种不同标记类型的性能，分别以绿色，红色和NIR表示最大发射。此外，对具有示踪剂的PE-HD样品瓶进行了测试，并提出了用于生成特定代码以改善聚合物识别的示踪剂方案。